This is the history of eSports that started decades ago

GridGames.ID – All great things must start small. Well, including the issue of e-Sports, which is now called “big” and its development is still racing.

There are many versions that can be told if we want to start a story about the beginning of the development of e-sports. Before entering the history of eSports, it’s a good idea to start with the old video game competitions, in the 70s to be exact.

Campus Children’s Competition

You could say Stanford University students were the ones who had to be “responsible” for the forerunner of esports in the past. Why? Because of them, the first video game competition began, in 1972, in October.

At that time, Stanford students competed in the Spacewar game to win a one-year free subscription to Rolling Stone magazine. Yoi, the prize was just a magazine subscription at that time. Fun, huh? Ha ha ha….

Oh, yes, Spacewar itself is a game created by Steve Russel and scientists and academics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Boston, United States, in 1962.

Before the Stanford students era, video games from the 50s had also started to be played by many people, such as Tennis For Two, or Pong in the early 70s as well. It’s just that, there was no competition at that time.

Speaking of competition, one of the biggest and well-organized video game competition events in the past was the Atari Space Invaders Tournament in 1980, this was listed as the most popular competition, because up to 10,000 people took part!

Then, the development grew even more rapidly in the 1990s, this was accompanied by the PC industry which began to develop and games on PCs had also begun to advance because of the development of the internet.

It was in that year that eSports began to develop and could be as big as it is today. Big companies such as Nintendo and Blockbuster began sponsoring video game world championships which usually competed in sports, racing, and combat genre games.

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